Geekspeak: June 24, 2002

GNU compilers advance; GCC 3.1 fixes bugs, gets faster.

Last month, the free software foundation released GNU compiler collection 3.1. Release Coordinator Mark Mitchell describes GCC 3.1 as focused on fixing bugs introduced in GCC 3.0. GCC is a set of compilers for C, C++, Objective-C, Java, Fortran and Ada. Support for Ada is new in this release; Ada Core Technologies GNAT (GNU Ada Translator) Ada 95 is now part of GCC.
GCC 3.1 has significant speed improvements. "According to the SPECint2000 results on an AMD Athlon CPU, the code generated by GCC 3.1 is 6 percent faster on the average ... compared to GCC 3.0," the GCC 3.1 New Features Web site states. "[Code] produced by GCC 3.0 is about 2.1 percent faster compared to 2.95.3."

GCC 3.1 supports an incredible range of CPUsit is a core tool for many handheld developers and embedded programmers. Support for 64-bit CPUs is stronger than in 3.0. (GCC can generate native code for AMDs upcoming 64-bit Hammer CPU lines.)

Timothy Dyck is a Senior Analyst with eWEEK Labs. He has been testing and reviewing application server, database and middleware products and technologies for eWEEK since 1996. Prior to joining eWEEK, he worked at the LAN and WAN network operations center for a large telecommunications firm, in operating systems and development tools technical marketing for a large software company and in the IT department at a government agency. He has an honors bachelors degree of mathematics in computer science from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and a masters of arts degree in journalism from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.